I think i might just stick with the GF4 MX440 as it absolutely murders the V5 5500! I'll just use a pair of V2's for Glide games 😀. I'll probably keep the V5 5500 as a backup though 😎.

The V5 5500 beats a 64MB GF2 Pro and a 64MB GF4 MX440 when it comes to 3DMark 99... It slightly loses to both Geforce cards with 3DMark 2000 and gets completely annihilated by the Geforce cards when it comes to 3DMark 2001.

PowerPie5000 wrote:

i'm slightly disappointed with the quality of it's FSAA! It looks a bit blurry compared to my GF2 Pro and GF4 MX440, and then there's the framerate with FSAA enabled 🙁.

Anyway, 2D quality and colour vibrance on this card is excellent!... 3D is good, but doesn't look as sharp or detailed as my GF4 MX440 (which i suppose is understandable with the V5 being an older card).

3D is not as sharp or detailed ad on GF4? Man, you really need 3dfx tools. Really. Like - immediately.
Actually, go here http://www.falconfly.de/vsa100.htm and download 3dhq driver for that voodoo. Settings for max quality (you may want to disable 4xfsaa for some games) and make sure to select LOD -2.

Then come here and post results 😎

Also, use the tool included in the drivers to set up custom resolutions and monitor timings. It's very intuitive, you cant miss it - and it works perfectly.

elfuego wrote:

3D is not as sharp or detailed ad on GF4? Man, you really need 3dfx tools. Really. Like - immediately. Actually, go here http:// […]
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3D is not as sharp or detailed ad on GF4? Man, you really need 3dfx tools. Really. Like - immediately.
Actually, go here http://www.falconfly.de/vsa100.htm and download 3dhq driver for that voodoo. Settings for max quality (you may want to disable 4xfsaa for some games) and make sure to select LOD -2.

Then come here and post results 😎

Also, use the tool included in the drivers to set up custom resolutions and monitor timings. It's very intuitive, you cant miss it - and it works perfectly.

I had a little mess around with texture quality settings and LOD... The results were not that great (slow). I even had to double check to make sure both VSA-100 chips were running! Drivers are installed correctly and the card is running in AGP 2x mode with sideband addressing enabled by default. Surely a PIII 850MHz can't be holding it back that much? I ran my old V5 on a PIII 650Mhz and it seemed ok at the time, but that's before i started using Geforce cards... It's still faster than my G400 Max though 🤣.

Welcome to the club of unimpressed V5 users 😜.
I always found it a bit too slow for my liking as well. FSAA is just too slow for me as well.
It is pretty compatible though with D3D, OGL and Glide games. In fact , it is probably the most compatible card right after the Voodoo 3.
I could never get VESA to work properly on any Voodoo card though, for example I can't run Mechwarrior 2 at SVGA or X-Men Children of the Atom at all, which to me seems strange since everybody here praises 3Dfx cards for their VESA compatibility, so I must be missing something.
You should take a look at the fans though just to make sure that they're working properly.
The V5 can get quite hot. Also, a PIII 850 should be holding it back a bit. I'd say they top at 1.266 or 1.4, the GeForce cards will still be faster though!

F2bnp wrote:

Welcome to the club of unimpressed V5 users :P. I always found it a bit too slow for my liking as well. FSAA is just too slow fo […]
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Welcome to the club of unimpressed V5 users 😜.
I always found it a bit too slow for my liking as well. FSAA is just too slow for me as well.
It is pretty compatible though with D3D, OGL and Glide games. In fact , it is probably the most compatible card right after the Voodoo 3.
I could never get VESA to work properly on any Voodoo card though, for example I can't run Mechwarrior 2 at SVGA or X-Men Children of the Atom at all, which to me seems strange since everybody here praises 3Dfx cards for their VESA compatibility, so I must be missing something.
You should take a look at the fans though just to make sure that they're working properly.
The V5 can get quite hot. Also, a PIII 850 should be holding it back a bit. I'd say they top at 1.266 or 1.4, the GeForce cards will still be faster though!

Fans are working fine 😀. I was impressed with the V5 when i had my last one (although i never used the FSAA feature back then), but i've been spoiled by Geforce cards since. Going back to a V5 5500 doesn't seem that great anymore and my little Asus GF4 MX440 runs circles around it! The V5 is probably too CPU dependent by the looks of things 😒.

I'll probably stick with the Voodoo2 for glide or maybe even use a glide wrapper.

All forms of SSAA inherently remove lots of high frequency data from the image and this softens everything. This also improves the coherency of the whole image though and can be very nice with some genres like racers and sims.

Of course it's subjective. Some games are much better played at high resolution. And if it's not Glide there's no reason to use any 3dfx card.

I thought it was pretty well known that 640x480 is the resolution you need to use for FSAA with Voodoo5 5500. 2x AA is not particularly worthwhile since it means super sampling in only one axis. And I thought everybody knew it was only about as fast as a Geforce 256. Not hard to figure out what it all means.

Just snagged myself a 12MB 'Procomp G111' Voodoo 2 card 😀... Apparently this model has the memory clocked at 110MHz. I find it strange how they only use a single heatsink with this model (although most don't have any at all).

swaaye wrote:

All forms of SSAA inherently remove lots of high frequency data from the image and this softens everything. This also improves the coherency of the whole image though and can be very nice with some genres like racers and sims.

Of course it's subjective. Some games are much better played at high resolution. And if it's not Glide there's no reason to use any 3dfx card.

I thought it was pretty well known that 640x480 is the resolution you need to use for FSAA with Voodoo5 5500. 2x AA is not particularly worthwhile since it means super sampling in only one axis. And I thought everybody knew it was only about as fast as a Geforce 256. Not hard to figure out what it all means.

FSAA doesn't seem to add any noticeable image softening with my Geforce cards... It all looks clean and sharp and runs quite well. I know the V5 wasn't up there in terms of performance with the Geforce 2 etc., but i don't remember my last V5 being quite so slow and the V5s FSAA looks horrible at any resolution imo.

640x480 on this card is just plain ugly and looks even worse with 2x or 4x FSAA at that resolution (Imagine vaseline smeared on the screen!). Some games don't load at all with 4x FSAA enabled... Anachronox freezes with a grey screen (although i can still ctrl+alt+del my way out of it 🤣).

Is the 64MB VRAM shared between the 2 cores, or is it essentially a 32MB card?

Yes it is essentially a 32MB card. It uses a form of SLI and both chips need the same data to work with.

I tend to use Voodoo5 only with a small selection of games. I like the 4x FSAA for games with only 640x480 support, and also some racing games like Need For Speed 2/3/4 (they work best with Glide too).

Believe me there are other cards with SSAA that blur. If you force sparse-grid supersampling on the latest GeForce cards, you will get a noticeably soft image. Radeon 8500 is soft too. I haven't used a GeForce 2's SSAA in many years so I don't remember what that looks like.

swaaye wrote:

Yes it is essentially a 32MB card. It uses SLI and both chips need the same data to work with.

Aaah that would probably explain why some games crap out if i use 4x FSAA above 1024x768 resolution 😖. I can't get it to use 32-bit colour with Deus Ex either (in Glide mode)... But that's probably down to the game.

I'll keep toying around with it and see if i can improve anything, otherwise it's going to be relegated to my desk draws where some other old cards live 😁.

swaaye wrote:

I tend to use Voodoo5 only with a small selection of games. I like the 4x FSAA for games with only 640x480 support, and also some racing games like Need For Speed 2/3/4 (they work best with Glide too).

What LOD setting do you use with 4x FSAA? i tried it at 640x480 and everything looked blurred (it made text hard to read too). It appears to blur/smooth the whole image instead of just the edges.

Glide was never meant to run 32-bit. The games look perfectly fine without it anyway.

32-bit output isn't typically worth the performance hit with old games. Some don't support 32-bit at all. Glide games may assume only 16-bit support since Voodoo1-3 are 16-bit only.

d1stortion wrote:

Glide was never meant to run 32-bit. The games look perfectly fine without it anyway.

It does look good, but sometimes you get that slight rainbow or banding effect with 16-bit colour. Does it also mean that many Glide games won't take advantage of the V5s large texture support?

PowerPie5000 wrote:

d1stortion wrote:

Glide was never meant to run 32-bit. The games look perfectly fine without it anyway.

It does look good, but sometimes you get that slight rainbow or banding effect with 16-bit colour.

View it as something that you will never ever "achieve" with modern cards... 🤣 But seriously, it's not noticeable during normal play. The game where 16-bit is really awfully ugly is Quake 3. Carmack definitely had no love for the Voodoos 😁

Large texture support? Seriously, in 1999/2000? The only games with decently high-res textures that I know of were those with S3TC compression...

PowerPie5000 wrote:

It appears to blur/smooth the whole image instead of just the edges.

That's why it's called full-scene anti-aliasing. Super sampled AA samples the entire image, not just the edges. Unfortunately it does usually damage text and UI things, but it also anti-aliases within textures which usually improves perceived quality. It isn't always beneficial though as you've noticed. Sampling the whole image is also incredibly demanding and that's why it's slow.

GeForce 2 uses a simple technique called ordered grid super-sampling that basically renders the game at a higher resolution and then downscales it. The chip can't do anything fancier.

More info
http://www.beyond3d.com/content/articles/37/1

F2bnp wrote:

I could never get VESA to work properly on any Voodoo card though, for example I can't run Mechwarrior 2 at SVGA or X-Men Children of the Atom at all, which to me seems strange since everybody here praises 3Dfx cards for their VESA compatibility, so I must be missing something.

You're right. VESA is crap on Voodoo cards. Fortunately there are a couple of tools that might help in this epic thread.

Back in the day I used 4xFSAA in 800x600 resolution, but I had to overclock the card to insane levels (200 MHz) in order for it to be fast enough. You need a card with good RAM and very good cooling for this. And the V5 will probably not last very long. 😵

Good to know I'm still sane 😜. I'm going to give VESAFIX a try, thanks for that.
Also, many thanks for those K6-2 CPUs all those years ago, the K6-2 400 is still being used quite often in one of my systems 😁.

5u3 wrote:

F2bnp wrote:

I could never get VESA to work properly on any Voodoo card though, for example I can't run Mechwarrior 2 at SVGA or X-Men Children of the Atom at all, which to me seems strange since everybody here praises 3Dfx cards for their VESA compatibility, so I must be missing something.

You're right. VESA is crap on Voodoo cards. Fortunately there are a couple of tools that might help in this epic thread.

Back in the day I used 4xFSAA in 800x600 resolution, but I had to overclock the card to insane levels (200 MHz) in order for it to be fast enough. You need a card with good RAM and very good cooling for this. And the V5 will probably not last very long. 😵

Not sure if the RAM on my V5 is good or not? My old V5 used Toshiba RAM and the V5 i have now uses Samsung RAM. My V5 is also using a 1.06 bios... Are there any benefits to flashing it to a later bios revision?

No, I actually wrecked my 3500 doing that. Need to get some cheap PCI video card sometime to revive it again 🤣